


Hello, Nurse?

by Sasseraph



Category: Animaniacs
Genre: Gen, Oneshot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-20
Updated: 2021-01-20
Packaged: 2021-03-18 18:40:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,640
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28871721
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sasseraph/pseuds/Sasseraph
Summary: Yakko Warner reluctantly asks for help.
Relationships: Hello Nurse & Yakko Warner
Comments: 14
Kudos: 119





	Hello, Nurse?

"You're a nurse, right Nurse?"

What kind of silly question-? Heloise almost didn't recognize the voice without his usual greeting. It didn't bother her so much as it was just routine at this point; to not hear it at all struck her as odd. Peering up from her paperwork at the little toon, she gave him a curious look. Yakko, without his siblings' presence for once, stared back at her with his head tilted, looking genuinely confused. The fact that she hadn't heard him enter at all was strange -- his solo appointment with the doctor wasn't for another half hour, but he always barged in right on time. The doctor was always busy beforehand. She was quite sure Yakko knew this, yet here he was anyway.

"Of course," she said cautiously, setting her pen down. Knowing Yakko, she opted to give him the explicit option to elaborate, lest he lose his nerve and go off on some other tangent. Not that he needed any help talking, but talking about himself in particular was another matter. The doctor’s hair (or lack thereof) was proof of that. "Why do you ask?"

Yakko ignored the question, only slightly looking like he wanted to break eye contact. "Like, for people?"

His demeanour remained curious and innocent, but Nurse already had her suspicions. Had she not already noticed the behaviour, she wouldn't have thought twice about it. A strange question from the strange children wasn't so odd, after all. She tried again to nudge him back to whatever was bothering him. "For the people and toons on the lot, yes." After a moment's deliberation, she decided instead to just ask outright. "Is something the matter?"

Finally he looked away, suddenly finding the wall to be quite interesting. She took the opportunity to give the toon a once-over, observing the nuance in his stance. His ears drooped only slightly, tail twitching as he considered his answer, and he gingerly leaned to one side as though perhaps he couldn't decide whether to stay or leave. Actually, had he been doing that the entire time? "Ehhh, no,” he drawled unconvincingly after a moment. She was about to say something else when he looked back up at her with a half-hearted smirk. “Well, really, everything’s matter!” Of course.

Nurse stared at him and sighed. "Yakko…" she warned softly, causing him to look back down at the floor, ears swiveling as though he hoped to hear someone march into the room and save him from the awkward interaction he'd gotten himself into. His tail swished nervously, but he leaned even further to the side in a nonchalant manner, using the movement to further avoid her gaze. She wasn't a psychiatrist; if he wanted to be difficult he could wait and do it in his session. "I can't help you if you won't tell me what's wrong."

This reclaimed Yakko's attention, and he looked back at her with a hint of annoyance. He shifted his centre of gravity back to that lopsided stance of his to properly meet her gaze and just stared. She wondered briefly how his sessions went nowadays, if perhaps the doctor had made any sort of progress with them. She could only imagine, based on the frustrated yelling she often heard, that their group appointments weren't the most productive. But on his own, was Yakko the same smug little toon as always, or this hesitant child she saw before her? 

He didn't seem to know what to do, so he just held her gaze. It was possible she was searching too hard, but she thought she saw a flicker of that uncertainty in his eyes before he looked away to glance at the clock on the wall. Nurse sure wasn't a psychiatrist, but sometimes she wished she were, if only to have a better idea of what those kids were thinking. On the other hand, maybe it was because she wasn't that he was less guarded. She shouldn't have been so intrigued when he finally spoke. "My foot hurts.”

Quite possibly the most serious sentence she’d ever gotten from him, and yet it was something so incredibly simple. His foot hurt. Was that truly so difficult to get him to admit? She grimly wondered just how long he’d waited before resulting to telling her if he had this much trouble asking for help. She decided not to ask.

“Let me see.” Yakko didn’t need to be told twice. He hopped up into Heloise’s arms like he often did any other day, giving her a beaming smile and a wag of his tail as though nothing was amiss. That was more like it. 

Nurse gently looked over the paw he presented, doing her best to ignore his distracting purrs and tail thwapping against her leg. For someone afraid of asking, he sure revelled in the attention. No doubt at this rate he would be making up excuses the next time he was in to jump into her arms; not that he’d ever bothered before. He flinched away slightly when she examined the bottom of the paw, and she let go when she saw it wedged beneath his pads. “Just a little splinter. No big deal.”

When she looked back at him, he was shuffling playing cards between his hands with mock confusion. “Are you sure? Because I can grab another deck.”

He ignored her tired sigh, tucking the cards back behind him as she moved to stand. Though he was clearly using it as a distraction, at least he was back to joking around like normal. She carried him from the empty waiting room to her office, leaving the door ajar and placing him on the exam table. "This won't take long at all," she reassured when his ears drooped somewhat, turning to collect what she needed from the cabinets. Nurse rarely saw any of the Warners so genuinely nervous. Though it seemed minor to her, she supposed in the end that he was technically still a child. He always would be, wouldn't he? Who else could he have gone to, if not her or Otto?

When Heloise turned back around, she handed him a damp facecloth, directing him to wash his paw while she returned to the counter to clean her own hands. "When did it start hurting?" she asked under the guise of conversation. She saw Yakko shrug out of the corner of her eye, but when she didn't act on it, he spoke up as planned.

"Dunno." Liar. 

_'Humour me,'_ she wanted to say. "Just today?" She kept her back to him.

"No," he admitted after a moment's hesitation. Gotcha. She'd have to keep an eye on it, then.

She took the cloth from him, using it to brush his fur away from the injured pad. "I'm just going to remove it with these," she explained, holding up the tweezers she'd cleaned. Yakko eyed them warily, but his quiet nod was enough for her. She stifled a laugh at how his tail fluffed out, and she was pretty sure he held his breath until even after she removed the splinter.

Nurse gently placed the damp facecloth back over where it had been, moving his hand onto it to get him to keep it in place while she grabbed the bandage roll from the counter. He watched as she carefully cleaned the pad with the cloth before wrapping the bandages loosely around his paw. At least it matched the white fur on his feet; maybe that was why he wasn't complaining like she expected. "All done."

Yakko blinked up at her. "That's it?"

"I told you it wouldn't take long," Heloise laughed, ruffling the fur between his ears. Stealing a glance at the clock, he still had over five minutes before the appointment he was actually here for was scheduled. "Now, can you do me a favour and come back tomorrow so I can check on it?"

His ears flattened sheepishly, tail starting up again when she started talking to him. "It's a date," he purred, only his obvious nerves betraying the tone of his banter. Nurse couldn't help but roll her eyes regardless. 

"You're fine. I just want to make sure it heals all right," she clarified. "Ignoring your problems will do that, you know." He merely grumbled at this, sliding himself off the table and dropping his weight on his good paw, gingerly testing the injured one on the floor. His ears perked up when he stepped forward, and he looked up at her with a grin, wagging at something other than her for once. "Better?" She smiled when he nodded, all but bouncing back to the joint waiting room. What a toon.

It didn't take Heloise long to put everything away, rewashing her hands and writing herself a note for later before closing the door behind her and heading back to her desk. No sooner than she sat down did she hear the door, and she looked up to see Otto returning from his lunch. She gave him a small wave, and he returned it before he seemed to remember who he was to see next, deflating with a tired smile when Yakko was suddenly hanging off his shoulders. She watched in amusement as he trudged up the steps to his office, trying his best not to trip over the toon that clung to him. 

Often she would have described Yakko as the ball of sarcastic delinquency he undoubtedly was, but seeing him today reminded her he really was just a kid. And rarely, he acted like it. As the office door shut and she was again left alone to her thoughts, she tucked the note she'd scrawled into the schedule book on her desk. Beneath all that snark, they really were just kids, and always would be. And that was all right.


End file.
